Critical Mass by Whitley Strieber

off, the little plane had wallowed from the weight that it carried, had fallen back, had struck its landing gear against a fence and caused the pilot to jam the throttle. There had been a moment when the ground raced up. Then had come the rattling sound of brush striking the fuselage, and the desperate kid had closed his eyes and pulled his stick into his gut.
    He did not know that he had missed crashing by the width of a child’s finger.
    So it is that the vastness of history rests in the details. A crewman fails to tighten a screw, the antenna of a reconnaissance plane blows loose, a signal revealing the position of Bull Halsey’s carriers fails to reach Admiral Yamamoto, the Japanese lose the Battle of Midway and therefore World War II. On the turn of a single screw. And why? Because the cry of a seagull made a homesick boy dream, for just a moment, of his childhood.
    So it is here, on this night. Had another boy drawn the stick into his gut just an eighth of a second more slowly, a city would not have died.
    History trembled with the shuddering of that airframe, sighed as the plane rose free and sailed off into the night.
    Its course had been carefully calculated. It would approach Las Vegas from north-northwest at an altitude of five hundred feet, not running any lights. Until the pilot popped the nimble little craft up to nine hundred feet, it would not be detected by FAA radars at McCarran.
    Military radars at Nellis did detect it, though, and Airman First Class John William Carr said into a microphone, “Bogey incoming altitude zero four hundred, speed one-thirty knots, proceeding west-southwest toward LV Strip.”
    Ahead, the pilot could see his target, which was the Bellagio Hotel.
    As he flew over the houses, the roofs, the pools, some lit and some not, he thought not at all of the lives within, not of the children with their toys and night-lights and unlived lives, nor of the happiness that was general in the place, like a song in the desert. He thought of the harlots in the evil towers and the alcoholic drinks that stupefied a man’s moral sense, and of the cruelty of the lies in the gaudy gambling halls, and saw steeples here and there. But his mind clung to his own home, to the sweet tropical evenings, when he had swung in the tamarind tree, and smelled the toasty smoke of his father’s water pipe coming up from below. He thought of the madrassa where he had been taught the Five Pillars and had memorized enough of the Quran to receive an honors. But he did not think of the moonglow that had illuminated Damascus a thousand years ago, in the innocence of Islam, nor of the softness of his mother’s hands. He did not think of Chrissie Powell, who stood now at her sleepless window, and heard the small plane come and pass, and thought it was some high roller coming into McCarran, and envied him the plane and the night.
    He leaned out his mixture and increased throttle, then drew the stick back and began to gain altitude.
    At Nellis, J. W. Carr instantly recognized this as what it was: this pilot was about to execute an attack in the form of an airburst at altitude. Carr hit the scramble horn, and Captain Michael Waldron leaped to his feet in the ready room, shouted, “Shee- ut ,” and ran for the flight line.
    The pilot in the small plane watched the Bellagio, tan in its lights, disappear as his nose went up. Dirty people were inside the hotel; he had walked through it and seen the strutting whores, listened to their filthy songs, watched the gamblers in the ringing dens.
    All Las Vegas was dirty people in filthy dens. He stared through the windscreen now at the stars. Heaven above, dirty people below. A sacred moment.
    Among the dirty people were Bruce and Caitlin Moore, who lived on West Katie Avenue—and her nickname was Katie; that was funny—who at this moment were making love. Their infant, Tara, slept in the co-sleeper beside them, the immeasurable sleep of the very young. Tara with her dusting of red